CRC Open Sources: Hezbollah flexing international muscle, increasing media deception W. Thomas Smith, Jr., Director, Counterterrorism Research Center Though barely a hiccup in the Western media, French counterterrorist commandos (members of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure) raided a Paris apartment, last month, snatching six Arab men – including two Lebanese and one Syrian – and apparently disrupting a Hezbollah plot to kidnap or assassinate top international leaders across Europe. In her column for the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick writes: “Documents seized [from the captured Hezbollah cell] included tourist maps of Paris, London, Madrid, Berlin and Rome marked up with red highlighter to indicate routes, addresses, parking lots and “truck stopping points” [as reported in Italy’s Libero]. The maps pointed to several routes to Vatican back entrances.” According to Glick, Libero also reported that the “truck stopping points” corroborated previous intelligence gleaned by French intelligence operatives days earlier in Beirut. Reporting this week, our own intelligence sources are telling us: “Hezbollah agents captured in Paris carried Syrian diplomatic passports and were in the possession of a diplomatic pouch, which was [in all likelihood] used to courier material and messages to support operational planning in Europe. It is notable this terror network was uncovered in the wake of [Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah’s] combative Ashura speech and Syrian misgivings of France’s public break with Damascus due to the latter’s interference in Lebanese affairs. The documents captured [we believe] represent a fraction of the overall European network that Hezbollah is in a position to activate.”WHAT IS HEZBOLLAH? Hezbollah – as I and others have explained in previous columns (as well as in our weekly CRC updates) – is a Beirut-based global terrorist army with active cells operating worldwide. Hezbollah also possesses an extremely sophisticated international media arm, which – like the terrorist organization’s military and security wing – is heavily financed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to the tune of one-billion U.S. dollars annually (in untraceable cash, flown in large bags from Teheran to Damascus, then trucked across the Syrian-Lebanese border into Lebanon). Various sources in Lebanon are telling us that much of that money goes toward paying off editorial staffs in Beirut as well as buying Western journalists in that country in order to whitewash Hezbollah’s activities. Some of the Hezbollah-paid journalists publicly claim to be opposed to the terrorist organization, yet rarely – if ever – do they refer to Hezbollah’s operators as terrorists: Preferring instead to describe Hezbollah as either a “resistance” group or nothing more than a quasi-religious-political movement. It’s a clever tactic engineered to deceive the West. This growing deception is working at various levels of the Western media – including the mainstream media, bloggers, and chatroom enthusiasts – which may speak to the marginal coverage of the captured Hezbollah cell in Paris. And we in the U.S. were privy to slowly simmering degrees of this deception over the past two weeks by the way in which Hezbollah’s recently-slain doctor of death, Imad Mughniyeh, was described by some media as a “hero,” even a “great national leader.” MUGHNIYEH THE ROCK STAR? Though certainly not “bought” by Hezbollah, the Associated Press even went so far as to give equal time to those who view Mughniyeh as if he were some mythic “holy” warrior: “Decades of eluding U.S. and Israeli intelligence won Imad Mughniyeh a mythic stature in his home village, where even his family knew little of what the secretive Hezbollah commander was doing. After his death in a Damascus car bombing last week, his poster hangs on every lamppost and building corner here. ‘My feelings toward him were the same as a fan’s for a celebrity, wanting to get his autograph,’ said Zane, 25, one of Mughniyeh two sisters.”THE THREAT TO AMERICAMughniyeh, incidentally, is responsible for killing hundreds of Americans during the 1980’s, including 241 U.S. servicemen – many of whom were sleeping when the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up in 1983 – and the brutal torture and murder of a young American sailor during a TWA airline hijacking in 1985. Hezbollah’s leaders today continue to publicly rally their followers with cries of “Death to America!” They publicly justify suicide bombing as a legitimate means of waging war. Hezbollah has cells and sympathizers (which may be germinating cells) operating here in the Americas. And the organization’s primary benefactor and operational director, Iran, may be closer to developing a nuclear weapon than we previously realized. Our sources also are telling us that if indeed the European operations were pending (and it appears they were), the leader-kidnap plot serves as “a potent warning for joint preparations in conjunction with Iran and Syria for wider conflict with the U.S. and Israel in the near future.”

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